Property of the Original Owners
by Jeffrey Opstik
Summary: The Simpsons take a vacation to a secluded estate where an increasingly powerful psychic presence begins to turn their new neighbors against them. Homer reluctantly pursues the mystery of their invisible guests unaware that there is only one thing the ori


Chapter 1

If Marge Simpson had been asked to commit her memories to a public memorandum few of the private ones would dot the walls for the readers to admire. Modesty was the thing that had never been swayed in the twelve years of her marriage. So she dressed according to her discretion, and as her husband believed, her public persona was in response to her own insecurities and unfortunate past with previous suitors. Before her husband, despite her equally indifferent inexperience with sexism and promiscuity she still attracted the attention of men with more physical than emotional agendas in mind.

Her mom had told her, sometimes you can't help it, but never had Marge taken the blame off of herself and so with each and every failure to gauge a man on a non-sexual level she tried to reinvent herself as a person, not a woman at all, but a person less persuaded by her gender or physicality. It was just her luck that the summer before her senior year, the summer she met her future husband, that she retired any chance that she could escape the lusting eyes of boys. That summer, rather than relieving her of any more effort to distance herself socially from temptation, she found herself burdened physically by a new and almost over-developed bust-line. Not long after her last year of high school began she saw Homer Simpson again, and not long after the prom fell in love with him.

It was, as she felt at the time, ironic that despite mother nature's preoccupation with her misery, in the midst of her hermitic endeavors, she found the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. So, in time, again she found herself withdrawn from the world. Dedicating herself, or distracting herself with her own two children, eventually three. While Marge's female form never escaped Homer's thoughts, neither did her own opinions when they mattered. Marge, despite Homer's declining physical appearance, was all she had ever wanted and knew there was nothing after him and nothing else she needed.

Time, just as it changes people physically, can use those same means, or more, to change not just their own images, but the world itself. As the world changed and Marge chased her husband into her mid-thirties, their mid-thirties, a feeling of routine sunk in and Marge decided she wanted to see the world. Everything and anything outside of her home interested her now. Though the point was now, that whatever they did, would happen so far away that these people, in this small town, could never know or judge them for it. They, Marge and Homer, for once wanted the company of strangers in their lives. People who they could lie to and be different people around, to engage themselves with in conversation and never see in the distant consequences to a few misplaced words.

While Homer had sustained a fairly public persona, Marge had lived exponentially through her husband. Not just through his anecdotes but through his friends, coworkers, the occasional public venue. Marge had felt all the more a pull toward this outside world for the very reason that she felt as if she'd leached off of her husband's successes and relationships when she'd stumbled upon his card games or talked to the wives of his coworkers. There was a feeling, because of her very passivity, that she never earned any of the things she'd spent time outside the house enjoying. Friendships and even enemies.

So when Homer had been told of the Crichton Estate through an office memorandum he jumped at the opportunity to tell Marge. His vacation was, after all, due to him in the next few weeks. So many months of consecutive abandonment of his own interests to make way for the interests of his employer had defaulted him the opportunity to return to those interests. But now he had other, less familiar interests in mind. His and Marge's.

Mr Burns, the most recent recent tenant, now the most recent realtor, was offering the estate as a timeshare opportunity to employees. Most whom had taken him up by that point thought he had in mind their own low income when he'd offered time for rent instead of property for sale. The fact was Mr Burns had hoped that in leasing short periods of time and not permanent residence they would never be the wiser of the fact that he'd known for the last few weeks now. He'd owned the estate for almost a year before he'd realized there were other occupants, the original occupants. The estate itself had a history that had circumvented the normally chronological sequence of normal history. Bits and pieces of the years, of any knowledge of whole decades had been missing from the town in which the estate was kept, and no doubt had been from the very beginning. He was not certain whether these moments had been intentionally erased or simply eroded by the ages. None the less, it was in his best interest that if he was ever to make his money back the new residents would never know what little he already knew by now.

Marge was ecstatic, there were after all, brochures and pictures online with which she could interrogate how old, how grand it all was. The immensity, the imbued royalty in the rich tapestries and furniture left behind by previous tenants. There was a catalog of lifetimes left behind. Marge could see it all and the listing went to no ends to elaborate on the rich history of the house. It was a diplomatic staple in the states, left for the finest royalty of Europe to live in, here, a home away from home. Perhaps, though Marge may never know, a better home then their own.

Mr Burns, Monty Burns, never had the gift of invention. He was never a person to create, it was never through means of creation that he could control or own. He had everything to him name through either stealing or purchasing. He did have, though, people that could invent these things for him. There wasn't within a hundred miles any diplomatic estate the likes of which he proposed Crichton to be. Crichton had years of decadence behind it, sure, but decadence had again and again bloomed, from generation to generation, into something so insincere it had evolved over the years into a experiment in cruelty. The occupants had absorbed themselves into the furthest reaches of their own vices and proclivities. Something had taken over for the parts of each husband and wife that had kept them together, that had allowed them the concern and care that each had fallen in love with. That each had seen in the other. The very things that made them human had been replaced with something more instinctual and dangerous. Something which by the end had claimed as many lives as it had controlled or failed to control.

Homer wasn't the least bit surprised that, being still beyond their income bracket, he, Marge and the kids would be sharing the estate with one other family. None the less, they still would be the first group of people to be leased the house since it was put on the market by Mr Burns.

When the time came they discovered they were the first to arrive. The house was all to them for now. Marge began to syphon off the rooms, leaving three to the other family. Still, what remained was miraculous in its sheer proportion, one that none of the Simpsons could recall seeing even in celebrity real estate.

There was a gothic almost romantic charm to every element that comprised the house. Something unusual and almost uncomfortably profound about the strange size of so many of the rooms. Marge found herself the smallest room. Once inside the larger the rooms she felt the bed become like a stage before an amphitheater. Making love like the old olympics, nude figures before an enraptured crowd. The huge rooms weren't private, they felt infiltrated, the sensation of being in each one that of a surrogate for a voyeur's vice. Something not terrifying but dishonest had she ever called it her room, it was a room in this house, but it was never her room. It never would belong to her or Homer.

By the end of the evening Homer and Marge were happy that they wouldn't be alone. The house was in the middle of nowhere. Where had once been plantations, estates owned for the cultivation of crops had been abandoned during the depression. Miles and miles of nothing and no one in all directions. Not a soul. Not another person for miles to care about anyone in the Crichton Estate.

The early paycheck from his paid annual leave allowed Homer and Marge a temporary recluse from their normal lives, their normal names. With new names dispatched, small masks would have to do for new faces, they would run around and forget about what worried them, because whatever bothered Marge and Homer Simpson was not their concern. It was the concern of the people to whom those names belonged. Marge could imagine this all, spent time in the car ride up here just making up games and names and lives they'd never lived. Later, when she told Homer, he was entranced.

There was, to the house, one body and two arms, or wings, that reached out into the side yards. That night, dinner done, the kids to bed, Marge and Homer Simpson wandered into the west wing. Marge found in her new wardrobe, the wardrobe of a previous occupant's, a long dress that, in its excessive length would always pool around her. It was for a taller woman, no doubt, but Marge was alone with Homer and didn't care what anyone thought of her in it, besides Homer. No one else would have the opportunity to see her in it. It was just for her and him. And it was for the better in that case, whatever of Marge's figure that she preferred only her husband see was quite accessible to the eye when she wore that dress.

Marge imagined that what had begun as a game of hide and seek between them could easily go on for an hour or two and so they restricted it to the first two floors. Even so, Marge could see that with her hiding and Homer seeking there were already so many possibilities among the gallery of statues and figurines along. Statues, ceremonial garb, life-size posable figures. And stumbling between them it was to her surprise and stupefaction that one of the figures, a posable African chieftain caught with the end of his spear the front of her dress and tore it wide open.


End file.
